WALKING BY TRAIN

I went by train from LA to Chicago: it took 45 hours or so on the Southwest Chief.  I knew I’d do plenty of walking when I got to Chicago but on the train the walking opportunities (obviously) are strictly limited.  

You can walk to the toilet, to the observation car, to the cafe or the dining car but this isn’t real walking, (again obviously).  The train conductor also made many doom-laden announcements about the dangers of walking around the train without shoes.
      And very occasionally you can look out the window and see somebody walking alongside the tracks or along the station platform, but that doesn’t seem very real either. 

However there's lots of opportunity for reading, and I had a copy of the New York Review of Books with me, and in 45 hours you can read every single word of it, including the slightly sniffy review by Ian Jack of Iain Sinclair’s The Last London.  I have only ever seen Ian Jack from a distance and frankly he didn’t look like much of a walker, which may explain something:

In the review he writes, 

“As a playful way of exploring and interpreting urban environments, psychogeography has a history in both England and France that goes back to the 1950s and the Situationism of Guy Debord, but it was Sinclair who resurrected it as a popular, or at least a fashionable, idea. Like ley lines (discovered or invented in 1921), psychogeography wasn’t designed to survive rational scrutiny …”

I think that’s pretty good, especially in a review that is essentially positive, and especially since it echoes my own prejudices about psychogeography and ley lines.

WALKING WITH WELLS

My dad was in many ways an odd man (that's not him in the picture above).  We did a lot of walking together, and we talked, though I think he did most of the talking.  And one of his oddnesses was that he was absolutely sure he knew things even when he didn’t. 

When I started reading “grown up” books he encouraged me read HG Wells’ The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, though I don’t  know if he’d read them himself.  And he also told me about The History of Mr Polly which he said was a book about a man who grew poisonous mushrooms in his cellar and killed his wife with them.  This sounds like a perfectly reasonable premise for a book but it’s not what happens in The History of Mr. Polly, which I only read very recently.

It's possible that he meant a short story by Wells, titled “The Purple Pileus,” about a hapless and unhappily-married  shopkeeper named Coombes.

Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and, sick not only of his own existence, but of everybody else’s, turned aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that goes over the canal to Starling’s Cottages, was presently alone in the damp pinewoods and out of sight and sound of human inhabitation.

In the woods Coombes finds what he thinks are poisonous mushrooms, and eats them in an attempt to kill himself, but he doesn’t die.  He’s transformed into a masterful and confident man, and his wife falls in love with him again.  So again, not at all as described by dad.

So yes, I’ve been walking again and it does seem that here in Los Angeles we’re still in fungus/mushroom season.  These, not especially lovely specimens, are in Culver City:

This is in East Hollywood, fungus thriving as it coexists with a traffic cone:

And when I got home, there was this waiting for me.

Fans of cacti may recognize that that the plant in the pot is a cardon, or “false saguaro,”  but what, I hear you say, are those two pale yellowish nubbins down at the bottom of the pot?  They are these things:

Arguably this is an indication that I’ve been overwatering my cardon.  I've been trying not to, of course, but we know it happens.  Anyway, the next day they looked like this:

Using the online “Myokey fungus identifier” it seems they could be one of 150 or so different mushrooms including amanita.  So then I did a reverse image search which suggested it might be this: 

In fact that’s mochi ice cream, but even so I don’t want to risk eating it.

HOLLYWOOD - PROIBITO OR MAGICA?

Sometimes Hollywood really gets up your backside.  



Though the gal doesn't look like much of a walker.

THE OBELISK WALK - DEUX

Look, obviously I don’t expect everybody to share all my obsessions, but since I got “hooked on obelisks” (title for a book?) I see them everywhere.  Why only this morning this image of an obelisk by Athanasius Kircher popped up unbidden, and inscrutably, on my Facebook feed:

A little research reveals that it’s from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, and it’s demonstrating the principle of the camera obscura, the devil being associated with shadows (I think).

Then I found this image by Edward Gorey (he was quite a man for an obelisk) – and as I’ve said before, everything’s better with skulls, even obelisks.

There are also two lines by Gorey in a poem titled "The Chinese Obelisks" that run as follows:

          A was an Author who went for a walk
         B was a Bore who engaged him in talk.

And then last night I was walking past Amoeba Music, a shop that’s been in business in LA about as long as I have, with the consequence that the mural on the side that runs down Ivar Avenue, is looking a little faded these days.  

But then – holy smokes – I see that in the two bottom corners there are fantastical beasts and obelisks!  Coincidence?  Synchronicity?  The universe sending me a message? You decide.

WALKING THE HIGHLANDS

Sometimes you do your research well in advance, plan your itinerary, and then you do your walking.  Sometimes it’s the other way round – you go for a walk, see lots of stuff, and you get home and thendo the research, in arrears as it were.

A little of both was involved in my recent drift through a very small part of Highland Park in northeast LA. I was part of a reading there at the weekend at a place called Bookshow – a bookshop-cum-tarot-reading salon (yes really).  I had never been to Highland Park and it didn’t really register on my mental map of Los Angeles, which was one of the reasons I wanted to go there.  

Wikipedia said it is “currently inhabited by a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic groups,” which I suspected might be code for “hang on to your wallet, hipster.” But Time out said. “Figueroa Street has found itself as another source of increasing pedestrian activity, thanks to its Metro Gold Line stop,” which sounded better.

         North Figueroa is the main drag through Highland Park, and Figueroa is one heck of a street running for some 20 miles, and from time to time (though not currently) it’s been part of Route 66.  I guess I covered perhaps three of those miles in a meandering sort of way, to warm up for the reading.

         The area was, I think you’d have to say, “diverse.”  On the one hand there were quite a few dodgy-looking places to cash checks and get loans, some garages where you wouldn’t feel all that happy about leaving your car, and the odd Botanica and Ferreteria.  

Then there were hipster bars, record shops and places selling midcentury chairs and coffee tables at eye-watering prices.

And most spectacularly, there was Chicken Boy, who I’d heard about over the years but never seen, and I knew there was quite a backstory.

Chicken Boy – a human with a chicken head. customized from a fiberglass model of Paul Bunyon - first appeared in the 1960s on top of a fried chicken restaurant in downtown Los Angeles.  The restaurant owner died and the model was taken down, and it was acquired by Amy Inouye – a book designer and art director.  It went into storage for twenty odd years, eventually being resurrected on the roof of Inouye’s “Future Studio,” where for planning purposes it’s considered an "art installation," apparently.

It was impressive, but so were the two lions on top of Devon Glass and Mirror.  It’s hard find the angle that gets both lions in the picture.

Research shows that they get painted in different colors from time to time.  It also shows that Devon Glass and Mirror receives some poisonous online customer reviews.

One of the minor things to notice (and these might form part of Nicholson’s ongoing “guide to the ground”) are the mosaics in the sidewalk:

That actually says N. Avenue 60, not N. Avenue Go, which is how I first read it. There are 14 mosaics along this stretch of  Figueroa, and I thought they looked suitably patinaed and historic but I was wrong about that.  They were installed just this year, designed by Wick Alexander, and funded by a $149,000 grant from the Los Angeles City Department of Transportation. They were a long time coming since there were delays with permits and then the tiles had to be tested to ensure they were waterproof and non-slip.  But they got there in the end.

Other things that caught my eye - Frida was there (she gets everywhere):

There were cacti for sale (always a plus in any neighborhood):

And there was this concrete tree by the station:

Yes, yes, I know this is all madly superficial. I shall go back to Highland Park, I swear, and get involved in some deep topography, the way you do.